The call to prayers, a fixture across Egypt at sunrise, sounded more jubilant than ever as a country weary after years of turmoil began marking the three-day Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

In Cairo, typically smog-filled streets of honking cars stood empty and quiet, aside from the occasional bleat of a ram.

Greek police say two Russians, both aged 23, were arrested Sunday for scaling a wall on the Acropolis and damaging it while doing acrobatics.

The two were observed by a guard preparing to scale the wall and were warned against it. They ignored the warnings, police say. As they scaled the wall and were doing acrobatic moves, several stones fell off of the wall, which is a medieval addition.

Nobel season opens with speculation rife over fugitive U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden's prospects for the peace prize and whether the first award announced Monday -- the medicine prize -- could go to research into chili, heat and pain.

U.S. physiologist David Julius has been touted by Sweden's leading daily Dagens Nyheter to win the medicine prize for discovering that pain receptors have the same reaction to pain, temperature and the spicy component of chili.

Since the creation of the Nobel prizes in 1901, six children have followed in the footsteps of their parents, becoming Nobel laureates themselves.

A seventh won the award jointly with his father in 1915 at the tender age -- in Nobel terms -- of 25.

Raising his arm, Yousef Ali hugs his elderly father in front of one of Islam's holiest sites as they grin for a selfie -- a craze that has hit this year's hajj.

But not everyone is happy about young pilgrims from around the world constantly snapping "selfies", photographs taken of one's self, as they carry out the rites of hajj which are the high point of a Muslim's spiritual life.

Yuri Lyubimov, a director who dominated Russian theater for half a century, has died at 97, after being admitted to hospital last week with heart failure.

Lyubimov founded and headed Moscow's Taganka Theater for 50 years, winning worldwide renown for his hugely visual and inventive shows, and influencing a new generation in post-Soviet Russia.

An American nun credited with curing a boy's eye disease moved a step closer to sainthood Saturday in what church officials said was the first beatification Mass held in the United States.

A beatification Mass for Sister Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, who died in 1927, was led by Cardinal Angelo Amato at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark, New Jersey. Beatification is the third in a four-step process toward sainthood.

The U.S. Methodist church's highest court will decide later this month whether a minister who officiated at his gay son's wedding can keep his pastoral credentials.

The Rev. Frank Schaefer was defrocked following a church trial in southeastern Pennsylvania last year, then re-instated by an appeals panel in June. That decision was appealed to the Judicial Council, the church's highest court.

The renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased a collection of 4,000-year-old Egyptian artifacts found a century ago by a British explorer, averting a plan to auction the antiquities that had drawn criticism from historians.

The Treasure of Harageh collection consists of 37 items such as flasks, vases and jewelry inlaid with lapis lazuli, a rare mineral. Discovered by famed British archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the relics date to roughly 1900 B.C., excavated from a tomb near the city of Fayum. Portions of the excavated antiquities were given in 1914 to donors in St. Louis who helped underwrite the dig.

Two million Muslims ritually stoned the devil Saturday in the last major ritual of this year's hajj in Saudi Arabia, while fellow believers around the world celebrated Eid al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice.

The stoning took place in Mina, about five kilometers (three miles) east of the Grand Mosque in the holy city of Mecca.